Film Screening: Skin of Glass (2023), by Denise Zmekhol (Afterlives sub-theme)

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Skin of Glass traces the filmmaker’s return to the modernist house designed by her father in São Paulo, using its history to explore memory, displacement, class, and the lives architecture carries beyond its intended use. The film follows the house’s transformation from a family home into a place inhabited by unhoused residents, and ultimately its demolition. Screening the film under Afterlives asks what remains when a building, its occupants, and its original intentions have disappeared. It considers architecture as a vessel for histories that exceed its physical existence, and asks how memory, loss, occupation, and social histories continue to inhabit architecture after architecture itself is gone.